


Helioseismology

by jerseydevious



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Aoviding Hypothermia With Father And Son Snuggles, Gen, The Author Bullshits Force Things, happy birthday sheep i hope you like your present!!!!!!!!, no I'm not kidding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 12:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21494143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Luke gets shot down on a supply run and caught in an ice storm. It's extremely lucky that his father followed him there.
Relationships: Luke Skywalker & Darth Vader
Comments: 66
Kudos: 591





	Helioseismology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sheepfulsheepyard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepfulsheepyard/gifts).

> This is a birthday present for my best bud Sheep, who is the coolest, and I am also late presenting this but that's okay. It's also a rewrite of a fic I did years ago that is the same concept. It's also not great, and I apologize, but I have so many fics I need to get done like ASAP that I'm throwing the concept of "editing" out the window lol
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

It was no Hoth—there wasn’t a planet in this galaxy or the next neighboring three as cold as Hoth—but it was certainly cold enough on Drasil’s poles to be deadly, and Luke wasn’t dressed to the nines as he’d been on Hoth. There was also the lack of a tauntaun’s warm presence beneath him, radiating heat like a furnace; their fur was specially adapted to absorb heat, and when a few of the tauntauns needed to be put down due to lameness, they’d skinned the animals and turned the fur into nice blankets. Luke had been lucky enough to be gifted one, by a rebel with a shy smile who’d stammered out, _ I used to be a—uh, butcher, it—it should be good enough—heard you were from a desert planet—okay—uh, thanks, thanks, I’ll see you… sometime. _ It had kept him uncommonly warm, because even inside the base the cold of Hoth’s night crawled in and settled in the bones.

Luke had gone to Drasil underprepared, because when he’d been selected to guard the supply run, Leia had failed to mention that the supplies they were picking up were from a base at Drasil’s South pole. Luke cursed her now as he trudged through knee-deep snow that soaked his X-Wing pilot’s briefs and numbed the skin beneath. He also cursed the leak—someone or something had given away that the Rebel Alliance was being supplied through an outpost on Drasil, leading to Luke being shot down by an Imperial fighter on what was supposed to be a routine supply run. It spelled disaster both for Drasil and the Alliance. The last planet caught supplying the Alliance, Byorn, had been bombed from orbit until its lush green forests were a smoking wasteland, and no less than a third of the planet’s population had been injured or killed in the onslaught. It was nothing next to the might of the Death Star, but it was horrific nonetheless, and Drasil—which was recovering from a planet-wide plague—couldn’t afford that kind of loss on a grand scale. The Alliance, on the other hand, had suffered constant shortages since Byorn. Several outposts had withdrawn their support and asked the Rebel Alliance to never return out of fear. Whoever or whatever was leaking information needed to be plugged, and as fast as possible. 

Luke glanced across the tundra. The clouds above him roiled and the wind whipped at his face, tearing viciously at his hair, picking up the soft, feathery top layer of snow and twisting it into miniature storms that played along the ground. There was a rocky outcropping a click away from him, which could possibly provide some shelter from the oncoming storm—he’d been forced to abandon the meager shelter of his X-Wing after discovering severe electrical damage that could cause a fire, and in the small cockpit of an X-Wing, he’d be burned to a crisp in seconds as the fire spread. Unfortunately he’d crashed in the center of a vast, frozen plain, and had spent an hour walking just to catch a glimpse of a single outcropping to rest against.

Luke made his slow way forward, legs aching with the strain of forcing through the heavy, wet snow. Finally he reached the outcropping, which bordered—and this discovery delighted him—an icy cave, no doubt carved by some tundra-dwelling creature. Luke pulled his blaster out of its sheath and took a moment to mourn, once again, the loss of his lightsaber at Bespin. Of all things, the hand had proved replaceable, but there wasn’t a lightsaber to be found across all the galaxy. 

“Just so you know,” he called into the mouth of the tunnel, “I’m coming down. Whatever you are, if you’d like to hide, that’d be very nice.”

There was no response—not a roar, not the scrabbling of clawed feet as something crawled deeper into the tunnel. Luke raised his blaster and swung down. He lost his footing on the ice and slid the rest of the way on the soles of his boots, but the main cavern—the only cavern, he ascertained after a quick look around—was empty. 

“I’ve never been so lucky in my life,” Luke said. His voice echoed oddly off of the ice walls. 

He picked his way carefully to the center of the cavern and dropped his emergency pack, which had been stowed in the back of his X-Wing. He pulled out the small, palm-sized heater—the power source should last him through the storm, until he could get out a successful transmission to Leia—and depressed the button. He dropped it squarely in the center of the cavern. Next he judged the rest of his supplies; several days’ worth of rations; flares and matches; spare blaster cartridges; a sleeping bag; three canteens of water; a tactical knife and a first aid kit; and finally what looked to be a basic mechanical repair kit. Luke flexed his prosthetic hand. The prosthetic was heated, both to resemble a human hand more closely and to keep the internal mechanics from freezing up, but with temperatures plunging so low the joints freezing up was still a concern. 

Luke placed the canteens next to the small heater, because no doubt the water inside was an icy slush at this point, and opened the box of ration bars. He broke a small mouthful off of the end of one, ate it, and then shut the box of rations and stored it back in the pack, settling it close to the heater. Then he pulled out the sleeping bag and slipped inside of it, scooting over until he was curled up next to the heater. He tried to raise Leia on the commlink, but as predicted, he got nothing but static—it wasn’t as if the Alliance could send anyone to pick him up and salvage the wreck of his X-Wing in the storm, anyway. He was in for a long wait. 

He settled into position and focused on the blue, slick ice on the ceiling. The heater hummed quietly beside him, and the wind howled above and the sky dumped snow through the opening at the tunnel, but his surroundings fell away one by one; he focused solely on the thrum of the Force inside him, the miasma of light in his chest, and focused on the leylines of the Force sprawling across the tundra. Weak, perhaps, but there; the Force found root in the predators that stalked the tundra, that swam in the seas below the pack ice, in the ice and the water itself.  _ For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you. _

Luke had been practicing sensing the Force, reaching into it, but the starships he spent his days on could only conduct the Force so much—it was nothing like being planetside and being able to feel everything from the infinitesimal shift of tectonic plates to the breath of the bug that landed on the hide of the planet’s largest herbivore. Life spun its web planetside in ways it simply couldn’t in the vacuum of space; or maybe it was harder to access the Force in space, and Luke just wasn’t good enough at it yet. There was so much he didn’t know.

He was so distracted by his thoughts, the questions he wanted to ask Yoda and Ben, that he didn’t realize there was another presence marching across the tundra until it was nearly on top of him. When Luke sensed it—he could tell nothing more than that it was alive, and heading directly for him—he scrambled for his blaster and aimed it at the opening of the tunnel. Whatever had carved this den must be back to claim it. 

Luke kept his hands steady on his blaster and listened, and had the wild thought for a moment that he could hear the regimented breathing of Darth kriffing Vader, and wild fear grabbed at him until he assured himself that, as far as their intel had suggested, Darth Vader was on the other side of the galaxy preoccupied with stomping out a slave uprising. 

But it was Darth Vader that landed in the cavern. 

Luke was so stunned for a second that he lowered his blaster, and when he reflexively fired it, the bolt was aiming towards Vader’s thigh; but Vader simply held up a hand and the Force pulsed, coalescing around the bolt and stopping it in midair. Then Vader stepped aside and let the bolt harmlessly hit the ice wall. 

“You,” Luke choked out, scrambling backwards. “You, you’re—you’re supposed to be—”

“You have a traitor in your midst,” Vader said. His voice was a rumble that bounced around the cavern in low, dark waves. “Your spies are too easily bought, and your Rebels are too easily tricked by false information. I suggest you make an example of your traitor.”

“The only example I’ll be making,” Luke snarled, “is of  _ you.” _

Vader reached out a hand and crushed his fist. The barrel of Luke’s blaster crunched as it collapsed. 

“I am interested to see how you’ll be making an example of me with no weapons to speak of,” Vader said. Luke thought he could hear an undertone of amusement in his voice.

Luke stepped backward until his back bumped the cave wall. He prayed that whatever had carved the den would see fit to return, so maybe he could slip away while Vader was preoccupied slaying the beast. 

Vader’s hand turned over and opened. Join me, he’d said. Luke shuddered, remembering the blinding pain in his arm, the shock, the all-consuming fear that had dwarfed him and convinced him to jump despite not knowing whether he’d live or die. 

“Your hand,” Vader said. The Force flooded with a strong feeling of impatience, and Luke had no doubt it was intentional on Vader’s part.

“So you can cut it off?” Luke snapped. 

Vader stilled. For a long moment there was no sound but the whining of the wind outside and the regular, sectioned breathing. Then he said, “Your prosthetic. Present it immediately.”

Luke jutted out his chin. “You think I trust you?”

Vader’s lightsaber was in his hand in milliseconds. It flooded the cavern with ominous red light, the tip of it pointed directly at Luke’s throat. “Present—your—hand,” Vader growled. The impatience had turned to an all-consuming rage, that felt much like being battered by the ice storm outside. 

Luke held out his hand, willing it to stop shaking. Vader’s lightsaber flicked off and returned to his belt, and then—careful, oddly careful, like Luke was something delicate—Vader took Luke’s prosthetic in his hand and opened the chamber on the wrist that allowed him to see the prosthetic’s internal functions. Luke yelped and tried to jerk his hand away, but Vader’s grip turned crushing, too crushing for the fingers behind those gloves to be flesh. Fearing his wrist would be crushed, Luke relented, perplexed and enraged.

Vader’s vocoder spat out static. Then he said, “Functional.”

“Not better than an actual hand,” Luke spat. 

If possible, Vader went stiller. “That,” he said, “was—an error. Which you would do well to learn from, young one.”

_Young one._ Was that affection? 

Anger filled Luke, and he said, “You call  _ taking off my hand _ and  _ torturing my friends _ an error?”

“You are angry. That will serve you well.”

Luke jerked his hand away, and Vader allowed it. It rankled, that Vader would allow anything, but Luke was out a lightsaber and a blaster and there was no way he could match Vader in the Force yet. He had hardly any training, and Vader had been fully trained by Ben. He breathed in and out and focused his eyes on a point over Vader’s shoulder, releasing his anger; it felt like draining an infected wound into the force. His Aunt Beru had been cut down her forearm working on the moisture vaporators, and the wound had gotten infected—with no money for a doctor, he and Uncle Owen had to care for the wound themselves. Luke had been eight. The smell of pus was still pungent in his memory. He swallowed his grief, and let his anger leak away into the Force. 

“I’m not going with you,” Luke said, stubbornly, when he could look Vader in the mask again. “I’ll never join you.”

“You have no choice,” Vader said, and he sounded amused, again. 

“There’s always a choice.”

Vader’s presence in the Force grew dark. “Not always. You are young, son, and you will learn. You are out of options. You will be destroyed if you do not return with me.”

_ Destroyed, _ he said—not  _ dead, _ or  _ killed, _ but  _ destroyed. _ There was a world of meaning in that one word. Luke was used to living on borrowed time after his tenure with the Rebel Alliance, but he was aware now, more than ever, that the most powerful forces in the Empire wanted him.  _ Don’t make me destroy you.  _

“You can’t take me back with you until this storm passes,” Luke said. 

Vader was silent, but it was as good as a confirmation. 

Luke pressed flush against the wall and took a step to the side, putting more distance between himself and Vader, and all the while Vader’s mask followed him, stony and quiet. How many people had died, looking into that mask? How many  _ Jedi  _ had died? _ No. I am your father. _

“Who was my mother?” Luke asked, when he was out of the immediate range of Vader’s lightsaber. 

The Force whipped around him and cracked the ice in the wall—it rolled and crashed and cried, with rage and pain and grief, pinning Luke to where he stood. After a minute more of chaos it halted so suddenly the air was knocked out of Luke’s chest, and Vader said, in the quietest voice Luke had ever heard from his father, “Do—not _ —ever _ ask me that again.”

Luke scowled. “I think I deserve to know.”

Vader turned on his heel, cape snapping at the back of his boots. “I do not care what you  _ deserve, _ you insolent child!”

“Then why did you check my prosthetic?” Luke asked. 

Vader stopped. His hands were balled into fists at his side. “It was  _ prudent _ to know that it was functional. You will need use of that hand for your lightsaber training, which you are in desperate need of.”

_ Lying, _ the Force whispered to Luke. “Sure,” Luke said, with a nasty grin. “But I bet the actual reason is that you feel guilty, and I bet that’s the reason you won’t talk about my mother, either.”

There was a thunderous crack as the ice wall nearest to Vader splintered into glinting shards. “You,” Vader said dangerously, “are a foolish, insolent, naive boy. You will learn otherwise. The  _ Emperor _ will teach you otherwise.”

“Wouldn’t you be teaching me? You are my father, after all.”

“No,” Vader said, voice still low. “I am not permitted. The Emperor will be your Master now. If you had joined me at the city in the clouds, perhaps—” and here Vader raised a clenched fist and stared down at it, “—but the opportunity is lost to us.”

Watching him, Luke felt an unusual, unwarranted rush of sympathy. Vader must have sensed it in the Force, because he looked up at Luke and dropped his fist. 

“I accept no pity,” Vader said flatly. “Those feelings are of no use to you now.”

Luke looked uselessly at the heater sitting by Vader’s boot. Now that the adrenaline of seeing Vader again was fading, he was shaking with the cold, but he couldn’t ask Vader to move, and he couldn’t just wander any closer. There was a field around Vader like an asteroid belt, treacherous to move through, likely to kill a person. Luke wondered if he could make Vader angry again, if then Vader would move. Or ther e was the Force, but then it would be obvious—and showing any more weakness in front of Vader made Luke want to throw up. 

“You were the pilot who shot me down today, weren’t you?” Luke asked. 

Another flurry of static from Vader’s vocoder. “No one else has the skill,” Vader said. “You fly… admirably.”

Something warm ignited in Luke’s chest, but Luke smothered it quickly, for fear that Vader would sense it. “Ben said you were the best pilot in the galaxy.”

“He did not.”

“I’m paraphrasing.”

Vader turned slowly. “He did not. Obi-Wan was never fond of my—style—of piloting, because Obi-Wan could not fly a ship himself.” 

Luke tilted his head. The Force was murmuring to him, but Luke couldn’t make it out—and then there was the familiar question bouncing around his skull, the  _ can I just not hear the Force because I’m not good enough? _

“Time,” Vader said, interrupting Luke’s thoughts. “It takes time, young one. You have had poor training from worthless Jedi. You cannot feel the Force properly because you have not been taught properly.”

“I’ve been taught plenty properly,” Luke said, heated. 

“In the Force, you are like a homing beacon,” Vader said. “You have no control over your presence. I can feel you from solar systems away. The only reason I do not know your location at all times is because your presence is so… bright, that it obscures itself. You are like a sun.”

“A sun?” Luke asked. “Like how?”

Leather creaked as Vader clenched his fist. “They have taught you shockingly little.”

“Just tell me,” Luke said. “I want to know.”

Vader turned to the wall and raised a hand. A circle carved itself in the ice. “Suns,” he said, “are the origin of the Force. Stars create the elements with which life is built, and therefore they must also create the Force. They are…  _ blinding, _ in the Force.” A series of intricate loops were carved into the ice around the circle—large loops and parabolas. “The Force surrounding a star concentrates itself on the magnetic fields, which are warped and twisted by the star’s differential rotation. This causes the great intensity of—vibration—in the Force, when near a star.”

“I’ve never noticed it,” Luke said, quietly.

Vader turned from his crude diagram, and faced Luke. “You are from Tatooine. You did not need to be taught the power of a sun.”

“But so are you.”

Vader inclined his head. “Regrettably.”

Luke inched backward along the wall, further away from Vader; he had a feeling what he was about to say would anger his father. “You were a slave.”

Vader stiffened. Instead of whirling into a storm, the Force went eerily quiet around him. 

“Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru didn’t tell me,” Luke continued, boldly. “I found out when I was a kid. I was six, we were in Mos Espa looking for parts to fix one of the vaporators. I bumped into a man and made the mistake of introducing myself as Luke Skywalker, and he dragged me off to the market. I don’t think I’ll ever forget seeing the slave auction—all those people, standing up there in binders, looking like… their world was falling apart. I could feel their despair. I didn’t know it was the Force, but I could feel it. The man thought I was a runaway. Because Skywalker is a slave name.”

“You were an isolated child,” Vader growled, “if you did not know that.”

Luke looked down. “Yeah,” was all he said. 

There was a heavy, pregnant pause. “You are shivering,” Vader said. 

Luke nodded to the heater. “I kind of need that,” he said sheepishly. 

“It is far too small to keep you warm enough for this cold. You will die in hours.”

Luke shrugged. “Better than turning to the Dark Side, in my opinion.”

The Force flew into a fury quicker than Luke had ever imagined possible, and another massive furrow was carved into the ice. Vader jabbed a finger at him. “Do not joke of such things.”

Luke raised his hands in surrender. With the cold sapping his strength, he was unwilling to deal with Vader’s tumultuous temper. 

“Come here,” Vader ordered. 

“I like my hand,” Luke said. 

_ “Here,” _ Vader snarled. “Now. I will not argue with you.”

Luke stepped forward cautiously. As he did so, Vader swung his cape off of his shoulders, and then when Luke was close enough he dropped it unceremoniously on Luke. Luke squawked as he staggered under the weight of it. 

“How do you walk with this on?” he asked, shifting so he was holding it in place. It was already warm—Luke assumed the machinery Vader wore put off an amount of heat.

“The armor,” Vader said, “is significantly heavier.”

Luke shuddered to think of dragging all of it around. Then he was jolted out of his wandering thoughts by Vader’s heavy hand on his shoulder. 

“That alone will not keep you warm,” he said, gravely. “My armor generates heat as a byproduct of its functioning.”

“I didn’t—think you could take it off,” Luke said.

“I cannot.”

Luke blinked. “So what are you—oh.”

Luke was pulled into Vader’s arms, pressed against the—admittedly very warm—chestplate. “Do not make this worse than it is at present,” Vader said stiffly. 

“It’s, uh, necessity,” Luke said. 

“Precisely.”

After standing like that for a while, and the constant movement of Luke shifting his weight from foot to foot, Vader stalked to the edge of the cavern, bent down, and sat heavily with the ring of metal meeting hard-packed ice. “You grow weary,” he said. 

“Can I just say,” Luke said, shuffling over to sit beside him, because with night falling it was getting too cold to even attempt resistance, “this is weird.”

The thought,  _ but not the worst, _ drifted to him from the back of his mind; and maybe it was true, that there was a part of Luke that was secretly overjoyed to have the very thing he had been waiting so long to have. There was a part of him, the boyish, naive part of him, that was aching for this, that was aching to  _ keep _ this—something deep and yearning. 

Luke settled in next to Vader and leaned against him. Vader was, naturally, as stiff as a board, but it was alright, because he was warm and the cold had started working its way in again when Vader had initially moved. 

“Why,” Luke asked, “do  _ I _ have to join  _ you.” _

“The Dark Side is the only way,” Vader rumbled. “Otherwise you will be destroyed.”

“I think I’ll be destroyed if I turn to the Dark Side,” Luke said. “Why don’t  _ you _ join  _ me?” _

“That is heresy,” Vader growled. Luke was intimately aware of the pain in his stump, the phantom feeling of burning he felt there constantly. 

“We could take down the Emperor together,” Luke said. “Using the Light.”

“The Light is powerless,” Vader spat. “The Light is the way of the weak and deluded. To destroy the Emperor you need the power of the Dark Side, and that is final. You are coming with me.”

_ Lying, _ the Force whispered again. 

Luke grinned viciously. “Whatever you say.”

As the night fell, Luke was pulled closer to Vader—he fell in and out of consciousness, too cold to keep himself awake. The last thing he remembered was Vader’s mask bent over him, the cold of the air swirling around him, and something soft and tender in the Force, something unerringly gentle. When he woke up for good, it was in the medbay of a Rebel Alliance starship, and Leia was beside him. 

“Oh, good, you’re finally awake,” Leia said. “You’ve had us all worried to death, Luke.”

Luke grinned weakly. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” she snapped. “Apologize to yourself for the sorry state you’re in. We found you at the rendezvous point wearing that,” and she gestured to a black fabric draped on a nearby desk. 

“Oh,” Luke said. 

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Leia asked, sharply. 

“Not right now,” Luke said. “Sorry, Leia. I’m just really tired.”

“That’s alright,” she said. 

_ Lying,  _ the Force whispered. 

**Author's Note:**

> The whole thing about stars and the Force is entirely made up. I bullshitted. It be like that.


End file.
